1. At present governments are the only organisations able to fund SPSs in a timely fashion
Which is why orbital solar power will never be developed until and unless that changes.
2. While governments are obviously fickle and short-sighted, O’Neill’s ideas came very close to being adopted.
The only part of O'Neill's architecture that came close to being adopted was the space shuttle, and that was a technical and financial disaster. O'Neill's company never made any serious proposal to build or test SPS either.
3. Nor have they been ruled out on practical or economic terms. A number of people did budgets for the SPSs/Colony plan and one estimate put it at (1975)$102.5 billion by one of the sceptical reviewers. It was also pointed out that the cost of the colonies would be a relatively small part of the budget compared to the SPSs themselves.
These were, presumably, the same people who estimated the cost of a space shuttle flight at $150 million and projected that NASA would be able to launch the shuttle 20 to 40 times a year.
In modern terms, as a government run space mission, $102.5 billion would cover the first two launches and a power point presentation, IF you allow it to be delivered five to ten years behind schedule.
4. If O’Neill’s plan had been put into effect as originally scheduled...
It couldn't have been without a reusable spacecraft capable of providing that architecture in the first place. The shuttle never came CLOSE delivering that capability. The only other thing that might is the Space Launch System's HLV concept, which isn't expected to fly more often than once every eighteen months and even then no sooner than 2021. In other words, in terms of launch capability and technology, we're exactly where we were in 1975, with the exact same technology and almost the same kind of launch vehicle.
No private enterprise venture has come close to going near the moon or even orbiting the Earth without government funding
And that is unlikely to change even when private companies begin to establish colonies on the moon. There's an enormous difference between government
funding and government
management.
They [exploring moon resources] wouldn't NEED funding if they were independently profitable. In that case, they would need investments.
Private firms are as likely to invest in off world energy as off world minerals.
Except that off-world minerals don't need to mature technologically in order to be profitable; that's one less element of risk in a business plan.
"Self assemble"? But they can’t manage a "simple" mining operation?
No, they can't. In the former case it's essentially a matter of automatic docking (a technique that has been used on space stations since the 1990s and perfected on the ISS). Mining operations are vastly more complicated, especially in an environment whose terrain and conditions are not yet fully understood. Tasks that become relatively simple for a human/spacesuited worker (i.e. walking around a rock or stepping over a hole in the ground) become immensely complicated with a teleoperated machine, and this is before we consider the fact that those machines will be operating with heavy drilling equipment and high explosives while moving dozens of tons of lunar ore in close quarters with one another.
Look at the operational history of the Lunakhod probes, for example. Like it's more advanced Martian cousins half a century later, there are periods of several hours to several days slowly inching forward along dangerous terrain trying to avoid a rollover or other instability that might doom the entire machine. Profitable mining operations can't generally afford to shut down for several days while some drilling machine tries to negotiate its way through a narrow driveway somewhere, which is why ALL mines make extensive use of human workers supporting the machines in person.
Once again you seem to have this weird notion that only on a planetary surface can people lead a "normal" life.
Yes. Because at the moment, that IS a normal life. In theory they could be made comfortable, attractive, even entertaining... but then, so could life in a giant floating balloon in Jupiter's upper atmosphere.
Just because something is habitable doesn't make it OPTIMAL.
A company which was actually headed by Martine Rothblatt (who went on to develop sirius Satellite Radio) and wound up in bankruptcy 8 years later.
A more relevant reply would have been: "Yes, that was clearly a
visionary concept" (financial success is a different issue).[/quote]
I don't think it is. Having a vision and BEING A VISIONARY are two very different things. There are lots of imaginative, ambitious and woefully unsuccessful people in the world who have some grand vision about the world or their future or their families or whatever. They are not called visionaries, because they have not the will or the capacity to turn that vision into a reality. And through no fault of his own, neither did Gerard O'Neill.
Boy, you have really got the horse a mile in front of the cart there haven’t you (though ironically that claim does make you something of a visionary
). Unless there is a
reason to go to space regularly...
That's exactly where O'Neill's vision fell apart. He was trying to INVENT a reason to go to space instead of working with reasons that already existed.
In this case, the reason for regular transport to space is cargo supply and crew transport to the International Space Station. That is the ONLY economically viable destination for commercial spacecraft, and it is provided by a substantial government investment in that huge orbiting laboratory and those governments' desire to milk that investment for everything it's worth. So a private infrastructure is growing up around the ISS whose capabilities will (and have already begun to) expand year by year.
That infrastructure, once in place, can be repurposed to support the construction of NEW facilities like Robert Bigelow's space station concept or to provide support for China's Tiangong laboratory. More importantly, people like Bigelow will be able to lease some of that infrastructure to other countries (India, for example) who are highly interested in space exploration but don't have the technology or the expertise. Thus the private infrastructure attracts new investment from other governments, creating new destinations for spacecraft, which in turn stimulates the expansion of that spaceflight architecture. In the mean time, we have people like SpaceX and ULA who either possess or are developing EELV-class spacecraft capable of independently launching manned moon missions even absent of NASA funding.
Building SPSs/Colonies etc, is that reason.
And waiting for someone to fund that huge grand vision is the reason why it never got done. In precisely the same way that waiting for someone to develop a massive HLV capable of putting a jumbo jet into orbit is the reason the United States Government no longer has a manned space program. That's the whole point of bootstrapping: small physical/financial investments with increasingly (slightly) higher returns. If you get a job as a messenger, you can start with a bicycle and bootstrap your way to a Ferrari; you don't START with the Ferrari and then start inventing ways of paying it off.
Sure, tourism could be too but the funding for that is a little more complicated.
Actually, it's pitifully simple: you find a rich guy who wants to fly in space, you offer him a seat, and he pays you. NASA and Roskosmos have been doing this for more than a decade, but only the Russians have actually managed to turn a
profit.
What we do know is that NASA needs a replacement for the shuttle and presumably, other longer range ventures. If they didn’t have a reason ahead of time, they wouldn’t be funding private spacecraft
Exactly the point. ANY space venture needs to have a reason to exist BEFORE you go about causing it to exist. SPS and colonies don't currently exist, so it's virtually impossible to get anyone to fund the requisite systems and infrastructure that would make either of them viable.
Point is, however, that all of the competing paths to space colonization--militarization, energy exploration/SPS, even colonization for the survival of the species--have all ended in failure. Russia abandoned its military space station programs and the U.S. abandoned its own; the Biodome project ended in failure and attempts to restart it under the auspices of "colonization research" were utterly ignored (and all proposals to expand the project into orbiting laboratories were soundly rejected at all levels). The only followon for Apollo that got any traction at all was the Skylab research station; in Russia, the Salyut space stations served the same purpose, and a few years later so did Mir. Space Station Freedom--a dual-purpose scientific/military space station floundered until its military mission was axed and it was opened up to cooperation from the international community. And even Bigelow's space station concept has been slowly retooled into a lend-lease orbital laboratory for government entities that want to do space science but have neither the rockets nor the spacecraft to build their own stations.
O'Neill was simply wrong, and government-funded scientific research is the only path that has any traction. This is unlikely to change by the time we are able to perform extended operations on the moon, and the lunar surface research installations will again be serviced by a growing infrastructure of space craft and space facilities designed to protect that investment. NOWHERE in that infrastructure is a large orbiting city called for; it will no doubt materialize generations later out of the needs of colonists, but it's not a means to an end for anything we could realistically do in space other than farm.
